Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Oh, goody! We've got the dirt on that appeals court judge

Turns out David Sentelle (Reagan appointee, and that's important) is one of the worst. He's the lead in the three judge effort to rob presidents of the right to make interim appointments when the Senate goes missing. As Charles Pierce puts it, with delicious logic and humor, Sentelle is someone "who believes the Constitution as written on a napkin at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon." One of his key supporters was Jesse Helms whom Pierce calls a "pathogen."

Well, forget Helms and just look at Sentelle's moral and political history.

For starters, he was instrumental in hamstringing Iran-Contra special
prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's efforts to bring the Reagan Administration
to account. He stepped in for the judge who was presiding over the
special prosecutor's office when the special prosecutor started
indicting some of William Rehnquist's dinner guests. ... ...Again, alas, we must return
to the Golden Era Of Beltway Crazee — the 1990s, and the pursuit of
Bill Clinton and, eventually, of his penis. Sentelle, who was promoted
in politics by the late pathogen, Jesse Helms, was still the judge who
was overseeing the Whitewater special prosecutor's office, and he was
instrumental in shuffling the original occupant of that office, Robert
Fiske, who was preparing to chuck the whole Whitewater scandal as so
much malarkey, in favor of the bedsniffin' yahoo, Ken Starr, and we know
what ensued thereafter. To say Sentelle was involved is to understate
things considerably. ...Politics, at Esquire

If you read the whole thing, well... talk about déjà vu "all over again"! The Reagan administration may have left us with more crud in the system than any in memory. And that includes the participants in the right's neo-con-games that left us with four truly embarrassing Supreme Court justices, the very fellas who will be making the final decision on presidential power in the matter of the NLRB appointees.